Phpstorm Editor fonts on linux systems

Question

So tired to search solution.. I use PHPStorm IDE for my php projects and one trouble just makes me crazy. Editor fonts (editor, don't care about interface) looks horrible. I've tried on different distributions and different DE but result is always the same :( There are screenshots to compare Kate and PHPStorm fonts. I know that PHPStorm is an JAVA application and it uses different font hitting engine, but.. Eclipse is an JAVA app too, but has pretty nice fonts. PHPStorm fonts on both Windows and OSX looks like other system fonts. Smooth and readable.

Is there way to fix this font issue before my eyes will explode..? Thanks.

Answer 1

Following the PhpStorm issue, here is what I added to phpstorm64.vmoptions (that I have installed in /usr/local/bin/PhpStorm/bin/):

-Dswing.aatext=true
-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=gasp
-Dsun.java2d.xrender=true

I also did the trick of opening the font in FontForge:

• Ctrl+A (select all chars)
• Hints -> Clear Hints
• Hints -> Clear Instructions
• File -> Generate Font

I put it in ~/fonts/

I am running Ubuntu 12.10 and after all that, everything looks quite great (I did it for Ubuntu Mono).

The only problem I noticed is that -Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=gasp leads to great editor font rendering, but poor rendering for menus and other stuffs. Whereas -Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=lcd gives awesome font rendering for menus, but less good font rendering in the editor. So try both and pick the one you prefer.

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Update: on Ubuntu 13.10, I have no problem anymore.

Answer 2

This is Linux specific issue, you can find a lot of information on this problem here. Check the comments for various suggestions and workarounds.

Here is what you can get with just a different font:

Answer 3

You can install infinality patches and patch OpenJDK to make it use freetype for fonts rendering.

Here are links about installing infinality and patched OpenJDK for Ubuntu-based distributions:

http://www.webupd8.org/2013/06/better-font-rendering-in-linux-with.html
http://www.webupd8.org/2013/06/install-openjdk-patched-with-font-fixes.html

And here is my screenshot of PHPStorm running on Fedora 20 with infinality and patched OpenJDK:

Answer 4

Try adding -Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=lcd to bin/phpstorm.vmoptions